


The Claws That Catch

by gayalondiel



Series: watsons_woes July 2011 challenge [28]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drugs, Gen, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-29
Updated: 2011-07-29
Packaged: 2017-10-21 22:31:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/230565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayalondiel/pseuds/gayalondiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Companion to And Afterwards Remember.  John’s head is a big, loud, terrible place to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Claws That Catch

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** The Holmes characters fall in the public domain: This version falls under the creative control of Messers Moffatt and Gatiss, and the BBC. _Jabberwocky_ is by Lewis Carroll and I am remembering the mome raths from the 1951 Disney _Alice in Wonderland_. No ownership is implied or inferred. This is done for love only.
> 
> July 28: Enclosed Spaces
> 
>  **AN:** This is not really like anything I’ve written before (and it’s in the present tense, which is me breaking my rules) but John was begging for a companion piece to the 27th prompt, and I’m not one to deny him. This is probably not the end of this little ‘verse.

It’s so loud, inside his head. Such a small space but it feels infinite, bigger on the inside. That should mean something but he can’t remember _it’s a good thing people like it why do they like it it’s terrifying in here_ and the colours are spinning again, distracting him. They rush at him and thud and hurt _won’t it stop please make it stop just a little while, just give him a rest, a few minutes, please_ and he can’t shut his brain up.

He wonders if this is how _he_ feels when he doesn’t have something to think about, if the thoughts and ideas and noticing things whirl into the psychedelic, amazing, terrifying storm.

He wonders who the _he_ he keeps thinking of is.

He loses the thread of that thought before catching the memory on the end of it. It’s been so long, how long? He’s not sure, but it feels like forever. The colours whirl and he tries not to sob, because it _hurts_.

Either a minute or a year later, maybe both, there’s a hand on his forehead. It’s like an anchor, tying him to the world outside his head. He knows if he gets this right, there will be something _relief quiet dark_. The owner of the hand has something, can make it small inside his head. Shut out the colours, shut out the noise.

“Sherlock?”

Wrong. The hand moves, withdraws. The cool air on his skin where it had touched him is sharp and painful. _Wrong, wrong, wrong._ He forces his eyes to move, looking past the colours and pain to the man standing there, watching him.

“Jim,” he corrects. “Jim. Sorry. I’m... Jim, please. Please.”

Jim smiles, and fits a syringe to the port on one of his _feeding lines drugs medication something he doesn’t know why is he medicated_ IV lines, and he feels the world shrinking down, the size of his skull, less, less, until he can fit his thoughts in a matchbox and still have room to spare, and he can rest.

“Thank you, Jim,” he manages to whisper before darkness falls inside his mind.

* * *

It’s loud again, loud with a grey roar, not bright colours, but big and noisy and he can’t make it quiet. They give him things that make it dull, like filling the space with cotton wool, but it’s a massive space and the cotton wool whirls and tumbles through the void before long. They make him eat, now, instead of the lines into his veins that take the effort from him and he resents it, because the flavours hurt his head and the textures give him new colours but they won’t stay and the space in his head is dull again.

Worse, now, with nothing to fill it. He would almost have the chaos back than this empty loud place.

He asks for Jim every day, even though he can see it hurting the man he asks. Why should it hurt? Jim has the answer, can make the space tiny, can cut through the noise. He doesn’t know why they won’t let him see Jim, and while he could sustain it he was angry, but now he’s tired and bored and the world is dull and aches and hurts and he just wants to rest.

One day, out of nowhere _they’ve always been there_ a string of words drift across his vision and he grasps at them, tries to put them together, and the man who isn’t Jim joins in and suddenly there’s an anchor _he’s an anchor_ and the world begins to recede, the void shrinks down. Not tiny, but for a minute, manageable.

After the man leaves, the void tries to grow again, but today he fights it. He doesn’t know how long he can hold the walls of his mind in place, so he recites the words, over and over, writes them down again and again, looking far into the distance where he can just make out _a flat, two men, strangers, so familiar, drinking something and talking and not crying but perhaps they should be because it was a sad night_ something he can’t quite identify. He holds on for as long as possible _hours days years months seconds_ clinging to the walls of his mind, and then the man is there, has it been so long, he comes once a day, you can set the clock by him.

And John _remembers_.

“Sherlock?”

The light in the eyes distracts him and that’s all it takes, his tenuous grip on the world slips from him and the world is suddenly big and loud and horrendous. He longs for the quiet, the little black matchbox, and he can’t help it.

“Where’s Jim?”

He watches the eyes dim, and knows that he’s got it wrong. But then the man sits, across from him, and he grasps through infinite space for that thread, that anchor that he found yesterday, or last year, or a lifetime ago.

He thinks this man has been an anchor before, one that pulled him out of a flat grey place into a world of colour, but colours that don’t hurt. He reaches and grasps but he can’t find the thread _where is it it must be here I need it I need you throw me a line_.

The man _Sherlock_ is talking.

“I thought we would try something a little less miserable today,” he’s saying. That doesn’t make sense, but he _John_ listens, still grasping because he needs this to work. He doesn’t want to float any more.

“‘Twas brillig,” says Sherlock.

 _Not a word_ says his mind, but he likes it, it’s a dark green word and he can see the line, a line of green, and reaches.

“...and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe...”

Why doesn’t Sherlock just reach out and move the thread into his hand, can’t he see it? _No of course not it’s in your head you live in your head in infinite space you’ll never get out_. He reaches...

“...all mimsy were the borogroves...”

 _There_. He remembers, small and fuzzy and colours but mangeable colours, little things that skitter and it’s not his head, it’s a memory, a picture on a screen and it _doesn’t hurt_. He grasps the thread.

“And the mome raths outgrabe,” he says, his voice quiet in a world that doesn’t echo.

Sherlock smiles, and he smiles back, and there is the anchor, he reaches out and clings to it.

He doesn’t realise that the hand outside his mind, his real _physical bones and flesh and muscle and skin_ hand has reached out until Sherlock takes it, holds it in a tentative grasp, not hard and painful but soft and light and kind.

And for a moment, the world is smaller, manageable, the size of a violin case, and he can fit his thoughts in order. It tries to slip, but Sherlock continues to read from the book in his lap, and John clings to his anchor.


End file.
